Infected Samsung Waves sold in Germany

Samsung has admitted that its new Wave handset shipped with SD cards that were infected with malware.

There was a nasty surprise awaiting German buyers of Samsung's new bada-based Wave this week, which, along with all the standard "iPhone-killer" bells and whistles, was bundled in some cases with a trojan-infected memory card.

The infected handsets would autorun the code hidden on the SD cards upon being connected to a Windows machine and infect them with the Win32/Heur trojan during the phone's standard setup process. Once infected, the virus would attempt to copy itself and its autorun file to any other storage devices connected to the computer.

Samsung have apparently put the problem right, but this Wave drama is another example of the proliferation of smartphone viruses, which first appeared en masse among jailbroken iPhones.

The Wave launched in the UK on Tuesday last week, although UK customers reportedly aren't at risk of any malicious code shipping with their handsets - while the Wave packs a 3.3 inch super AMOLED touchscreen, 1GHz processor and a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, the UK version does not come bundled with an SD card - infected or otherwise.